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Cyanobacteria are ubiquitous in marine environments and play important roles as primary producers. They are part of the marine phytoplankton, which currently contributes almost half of the Earth's total primary production. [33] About 25% of the global marine primary production is contributed by cyanobacteria. [34]
Many cyanobacteria form motile filaments of cells, called hormogonia, that travel away from the main biomass to bud and form new colonies elsewhere. [45] [46] The cells in a hormogonium are often thinner than in the vegetative state, and the cells on either end of the motile chain may be tapered. To break away from the parent colony, a ...
The following sequences take place in formation of heterocysts from a vegetative cell: The cell enlarges. Granular inclusions decrease. Photosynthetic lammel reorients. The wall finally becomes triple-layered. These three layers develop outside the cell's outer layer. The middle layer is homogeneous. The inner layer is laminated.
These structures can fill most of the interior of a cell, giving the membrane a very large surface area and therefore increasing the amount of light that the bacteria can absorb. [23] In plants and algae, photosynthesis takes place in organelles called chloroplasts. A typical plant cell contains about 10 to 100 chloroplasts. The chloroplast is ...
Cyanobacteria are photosynthetic prokaryotes that have existed on Earth for an estimated 2.7 billion years. The ability of cyanobacteria to produce oxygen initiated the transition from a planet consisting of high levels of carbon dioxide and little oxygen, to what has been called the Great Oxygenation Event where large amounts of oxygen gas were produced. [4]
The organisms responsible for primary production are called primary producers or autotrophs. Most marine primary production is generated by a diverse collection of marine microorganisms called algae and cyanobacteria. Together these form the principal primary producers at the base of the ocean food chain and produce half of the world's oxygen ...
Synechococcus is one of the most important components of the prokaryotic autotrophic picoplankton in the temperate to tropical oceans. The genus was first described in 1979, [5] [6] and was originally defined to include "small unicellular cyanobacteria with ovoid to cylindrical cells that reproduce by binary traverse fission in a single plane and lack sheaths". [7]
In other words, cyanobacterial cell division must be done at a rate matching their host in order to divide at similar times. As free living organisms, cyanobacteria typically divide more frequently compared to eukaryotic cells, but as symbionts, cyanobionts slow down division times so they do not overwhelm their host. [8]